08 June 2013

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.

By Michael Hastings

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has
delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has
washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his
party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

Glenn Greenwald’s
exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the
entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty
opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W.
Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

The
very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the
most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems —
including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and
Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of
programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke
during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues
to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the
presidential primary of 2007-2008.

Recall what Senator Levin told
CNN in 2005, demanding to “urgently hold an inquiry” into what was
supposedly President Bush’s domestic wiretap program.

Levin
continued, at length: “It means that there’s some growing concern on
Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized
and unexplained…The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it
is totally legal, but he doesn’t give what the legal basis is for this.
He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even
when there is an emergency and there’s a need for urgent action can
first tap the wire and then go to a court.”

There are two notable
exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen.
Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely
lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.

As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: “[I] did everything short of leaking classified information” to stop it.

His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian’s
news break: “I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a
law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when
they call and where they call from will be kept private,” Wyden said to
Politico, noting “there’s going to be a big debate about this.” The
Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he’d mislead
Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement
yesterday to state that the NSA didn’t do “voyerustic” surveillance.

The
state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators
went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional
security oaths in order to warn the country of information that
otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038,
according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.

Now, we’re about to see if the Obama administration’s version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.

Unsurprisingly,
the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools
“essential” to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge
they’ve seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama’s
leadership. The AP spying scandal — which the administration attempted
to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own
investigation into himself —was one of the unexpected consequences of
one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012
campaign.

It’s unclear where a possible third leak investigation
would lead. However, judging by the DOJ’s and FBI’s recent history, it
would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone
records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at
various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as
well as politicians and staffers in Congress—records, we now can safely
posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.

In short:
any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature,
would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very
surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to
snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one
based overseas.Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration
that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified.
Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters,
especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections
between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities
involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the
Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.

Jacob
Appplebaum, a transparency activist and computer savant, has been
repeatedly harassed at American borders, having his laptop seized.
Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for
Vanity Fair, among others publications, exposed the connections between
the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm
that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of
the Guardian’s Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas
prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial
inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.

That’s
not to mention former NSA official Thomas Drake (the Feds tried to
destroys his life because he blew the whistle ); Fox News reporter James
Rosen (named a “co-conspirator” by Holder’s DOJ); John Kirakou,
formerly in the CIA, who raised concerns about the agency’s torture
program, is also in prison for leaking “harmful” (read: embarrassing)
classified info; and of course Wikileaks (under U.S. financial embargo);
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (locked up in Ecuador’s London
embassy) and, of course, Bradley Manning, the young, idealistic, soldier
who provided the public with perhaps the most critical trove of
government documents ever released.

The attitude the Obama
administration has toward Manning is revealing. What do they think of
him? “Fuck Bradely Manning,” as one White House official put it to me
last year during the campaign.

‘This administration also puts forward a false choice
between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide. I will
provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools
they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining the Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.

No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.

No more tracking citizens who do nothing but protest a [policy].

No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

It is not who we are. It is not what is necessary to defeat the
terrorists. The FISA Court works. The separation of powers works. Our
Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers and that justice is not arbitrary.

This administration acts like violating civil liberties
is the way to enhance our security. It is not. There are no short cuts
to protecting America.’

07 June 2013

The Obama Hockey Stick and the desperate attempt to 'Hide the Decline'

By Nile Gardiner

The last few weeks have been among the worst of Barack Obama’s time
in office, recalling earlier periods of turmoil for the president in2010 and 2011,
when his ratings also plummeted. In 2013, the situation is
significantly worse for the White House, with the Obama administration
engulfed in a series of major scandals (IRS persecution of conservative
groups, the Benghazi debacle, and the Justice Department seizure of
journalists’ phone records) that are not only eroding trust in
government but also in the office of the president itself. This is
undoubtedly a period of steep decline for the Obama presidency, whose
imperial-style big government approach is being increasingly questioned
not only by American voters, but also by formerly subservient sections
of the liberal-dominated mainstream media. In contrast to his first
term, Barack Obama is finding himself less and less shielded by the
press, and far more vulnerable to public criticism.

With good reason, Americans don’t feel optimistic about their
country’s future with President Obama at the helm. According to the RealClear Politics polling average, less than one in three Americans believe the United States is heading in the right direction. A new Economist/YouGov poll has
the president’s job approval rating at just 46 percent, with 49 percent
of Americans disapproving. Strikingly, 35 percent of Americans
“strongly disapprove” of the president’s job performance, 15 points
higher than the number who “strongly approve.” A mere 31 percent of
Americans surveyed by YouGov believe the United States is “generally
headed in the right direction.”

In addition to damaging scandals, which have raised major questions
over the integrity and judgment of the Obama administration, there
remain deep-seated concerns over the US economy and the enormous
national debt, widespread opposition to the president’s health care
reforms, and significant fears over national security. Barack Obama’s
second term could not have started more badly for the “hope and change”
president, who, with three and a half years in office remaining, looks
more and more like a lame duck. Here are ten key reasons why the Obama
presidency is in trouble, with the outlook exceedingly grim for the
White House

1. The American public is losing trust in Obama

A recent Quinnipiac survey
found that less than half of Americans (49 percent) now view their
president as “honest and trustworthy.” According to Quinnipiac, the
series of recent scandals have begun to significantly dent the
president’s standing with the American people, with his approval rating
standing at just 45 percent. The IRS targeting of conservative groups
has been particularly damaging, with 76percent of voters supporting
the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal, and
a series of Congressional hearings putting the Obama administration on
the spot. Another survey, byNBC News/The Wall Street Journal,
reveals a great deal of public concern over the “overall honesty and
integrity of the Obama administration,” with more than half of Americans
agreeing that recent scandals have “raised doubts” about the
government’s trustworthiness. 41 percent of Americans believe that
President Obama himself is “totally” or “mainly” responsible for the
government’s handling of Benghazi – just 19 percent believe he bears no
responsibility. On the IRS issue, only 24 percent say the president is
not responsible in any way, while a third of Americans think he is
largely culpable.

2. The Obama presidency is imperial in style and outlook

Leading conservative talk radio host Mark Levin was absolutely right when he blasted Barack Obama on Fox News back in January as “an imperial president.”
It would be hard to find a US president in recent times who has behaved
in a more arrogant fashion than President Obama, and that includes
Richard Nixon. The Obama White House is routinely disdainful of
criticism, sneeringly dismissive of Congressional opposition, nasty and
brutish towards dissenting voices in the media, and completely lacking
in humility. Even veteran reporters such as Bob Woodward, one of two
journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, have found themselves on
the sharp end of the White House’s boot after publishing unflattering
stories.Woodward was warned earlier this year by
a senior White House official that he would “regret” his remarks about
the president’s handling of the sequester issue. At the same time the
Obama presidency exudes a shameless “let them eat cake” mentality,
abundantly on display with the president’s lavish vacations and golfing
expeditions while millions of American families have struggled to pay
their mortgage and stay afloat against the backdrop in recent years of
the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

3. Most Americans are still worried about the economy

Economic concerns are the top priority for Americans according to Gallup. In arecent poll,
86 percent of Americans agreed that “creating more jobs” and “helping
the economy grow” are the top two priorities. “Making government work
more efficiently” came third, at 81 percent. Despite a slight uptick in
economic growth, and improving housing prices in some markets, the
United States still has deep-seated economic problems. Most Americans
are still nervous about the economy. According to the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey,
just 46 percent of Americans approve of the job Barack Obama is doing
in handling the economy. 64 percent of Americans are “somewhat
dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the state of the US economy
today. Only 32 percent believe the economy will get better in the next
12 months. 58 percent of Americans still think the country is in an
economic recession.

Strong job creation and robust economic growth are being
significantly hampered in the United States by declining economic
freedom, including rising tax rates, the growing burden of government
regulation, and a rising dependency culture. Unemployment still remains
at 7.5 percent, with nearly 12 million Americans out ofwork. 47 million Americans are living on food stamps (the highest figure in American history), and a staggering 128 million Americans are
now dependent upon government programmes. A full economic recovery
still remains far away. According to the Federal Reserve, Americans have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost to the recession. As The Washington Post
reported: “The research from the St. Louis Fed shows that households
had accumulated net worth totaling $66 trillion at the end of last year.
After adjusting for inflation and population growth, the bank found
that number amounted to only 45 percent of the wealth that Americans had
during the peak of the boom in 2007.”

4. America’s level of debt is frightening

America’s economic problems are compounded by its huge debt problem.
Barack Obama continues to lead the United States down the path of
European Union-style decline, with incredible levels of public debt,
currently standing at $16.85 trillion, a per person debt of $53,000.
President Obama has done nothing to confront the vast entitlement
programmes that are a yoke around the necks of future generations of
American taxpayers, while taking an axe to defense spending, resulting
in politically driven cuts that undermine America’s national security
while doing nothing to reduce the country’s debt burden. As he made
clear in his Inauguration address in
January, President Obama remains committed to a big spending, big
government vision, and one that will force the United States down the
road to economic ruin unless it is reversed.

5. Obamacare is hugely expensive and increasingly unpopular

A key liability that will further expand America’s debt mountain is
Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), the Obama administration’s hugely
ambitious and expensive health care reform initiative that threatens to
dramatically increase the cost of healthcare for ordinary Americans as
well as businesses, when it goes into effect next year. Forbes Magazine reports that in California Obamacare is expected to increase individual health insurance premiumsby 64 to 146 percent. The latest Congressional Budget Office estimate puts a $1.85 trillion price tagon Obamacare in its first 10 years. A clear majority of Americans oppose Obamacare. The latestCNN/ORC International poll shows 54 percent opposing the law. A Reason/Rupepoll found that a mere 32 percent support it. An April poll by the Kaiser Foundation, and reported by Politico, revealed that “just 35 percent of Americans view Obamacare ‘very’ or somewhat’
favorably, down 8 points since Election Day.” Opposition in the business
community is also high, especially among small businesses, the bedrock
of the US economy. Gallup finds
that 48 percent of small business owners say the Affordable Care Act is
bad for business – just nine percent say it will be good for business.
As Obamacare rolls in, opposition to its implementation will only grow.
If the Republicans retake the Senate in 2014, expect Congress to launch a
major effort to repeal it.

6. Independents are rapidly withdrawing support for Obama

As Gallup polling has consistently shown, America isideologically a conservative nation, with conservatives outnumbering liberals by a nearly two to one margin. Strikingly, as Gallup has found,
more than 50 percent of Americans view Obama as more liberal than
themselves, with just 27 percent of voters declaring that they share the
same ideology as the president. Despite a clear advantage in terms of
ideology, the Republicans have struggled to win over sufficient numbers
of “moderates” (roughly a third of US voters) in the last two
presidential elections, many of whom identify themselves as
“Independents.” There are signs, however, that support for Obama among
Independents is dramatically falling. According to the recent Quinnipiac survey,
57 percent of Independent voters give Obama a negative rating, up from
48 percent on May 1st. 56 percent of Independents do not believe the
president is “honest and trustworthy.” By a 45 percent to 35 percent
margin, Independents believe that Republicans in Congress are doing a
better job than President Obama on handling the economy.

7. The liberal media is less deferential to Obama in his second term

The Washington Post, standard bearer of the liberal
establishment in the US capital, has labeled the IRS scandal a “horror
story” for the Obama administration. Even The New York Times, the de facto inflight newspaper of Air Force One, recently carried a headline on its front page declaring: "Onset of Woes Casts Pall Over Obama's Policy Aspirations." The
liberal mainstream media closed ranks behind Barack Obama for most of
his first term in office, and relentlessly pummeled his presidential
election opponent Mitt Romney ahead of the November 2012 vote, in a
shameless display of bias towards their favoured candidate. The big
liberal newspapers and the major television networks, NBC, ABC and CBS,
have been less willing to bat for Obama in his second term as public
opinion has begun to turn against the White House. Clearly, there are
some things even the most liberal columnists are finding hard to defend,
such as the ruthless targeting of political opponents. Meanwhile, MSNBC, President Obama’s biggest flag-waver on cable news, has seen its ratings plummet in recentmonths, with Fox News further building its dominance of the ratings.

8. The Benghazi scandal has been extremely damaging

Much as the Obama administration tries to downplay the significance
of the Benghazi scandal, it refuses to go away, with 46 percent of
Americans believing “the administration deliberately misled the American
people about the events surrounding the death of the American
Ambassador to Libya” according toQuinnipiac.
Like the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle has undermined trust and
confidence in the Obama presidency. 58 percent of Americans in the most
recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal
survey agree that that the State Department’s handling of the Benghazi
attack raises doubts “about the overall honesty and integrity of the
Obama administration.”

In the aftermath of the barbaric killing of Ambassador Stevens and
three other Americans on September 11, 2012 at the hands of al-Qaeda
linked Islamist militants, the Obama administration tried to pass off
the brutal attack as a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video
that hardly anyone has seen. Undoubtedly worried that the killings would
upset the White House’s carefully crafted narrative in the lead up to
the 2012 election that al-Qaeda was in retreat, administration officials
sought to downplay the broader significance of the attack in the run up
to the presidential vote, a strategy that succeeded in the short term,
but has since imploded in the face of sustained Congressional scrutiny.
Not only has Benghazi damaged the president, it also hurt former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s image too. As former Reagan
speechwriter Peggy Noonan noted in The Wall Street Journal:
“Will this story ever be completely told? Maybe not. But it’s not going
to go away either. It’s a prime example of the stupidity of
all-politics-all-the-time. You make some bad moves for political
reasons. And then you suffer politically because you make bad moves.”

9. Obama’s national security strategy is weak and confusing

President Obama’s recent address to the National Defense University at
Fort McNair in Washington has to go down as one of the most weak-kneed
speeches by a US Commander-in-Chief in modern times. His call for a
winding down of the global war against Islamist terror was naïve in the
extreme, and sent completely the wrong signal to America’s enemies at a
time when al-Qaeda is strengthening its presence in parts of the Middle
East as well as North, West and East Africa. His declaration (once
again) that the detention facility at Guantanamo should be shut down was
hopelessly unrealistic in the face of concerted Congressional
opposition as well as a humiliating exercise in pandering to
international condemnation in Europe and the Muslim world. His
Guantanamo policy is deeply out of touch as well with American public
opinion. US polls have consistently shown strong
support for keeping the camp in operation. This is hardly a strategy
that will endear President Obama to an American public that feels less safe today than it did in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

10. Obama is “leading from behind” on the world stage

American foreign policy has become even more weak and incoherent in
President Obama’s second term. On the world stage the United States has
not been this powerless and disengaged since the days of Jimmy Carter.
“Leading from behind” is no longer just a mantra for the Obama
administration – it has become its philosopher’s stone. Washington’s
leadership on the Syria crisis is non-existent, with the White House
content to farm out its foreign policy to Moscow and the United Nations.
On Afghanistan, Obama’s position is one of retreat and a handover of
power back to the Taliban. Iran is barely mentioned by the president, as
Tehran’s nuclear ambitions march on. Meanwhile key allies such as
Britain are treated with contempt and lectured to on European policy
as though it were a schoolboy being reprimanded for speaking out of
turn, while the Special Relationship and the transatlantic alliance
continue to be eroded. At home and abroad, the Obama presidency is
weakening America, while undercutting the strength and ability of the
world's only superpower to lead internationally.

A few
years ago, after one corruption scandal too many, the then Liberal
government in Canada announced that, to prevent further outbreaks of
malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new federal auditors plus a bunch of
ethics czars, and mandating “integrity provisions” in government
contracts, including “prohibitions against paying, offering, demanding
or accepting bribes.” There were already plenty of laws against bribery,
but one small additional sign on the desk should do the trick: “Please
do not attempt to bribe the Minister of the Crown as a refusal may
offend. Also: He’s not allowed to bribe you, whatever he says.” A
government that requires “integrity provisions” is by definition past
the stage where they will do any good.

I thought of those Canadian
Liberal “integrity provisions” passing a TV screen the other day and
catching hack bureaucrats from the IRS Small Business/Self-Employed
Division reassuring Congress that systems had now been put in place to
prevent them succumbing to the urge to put on Spock ears and
moob-hugging blue polyester for the purposes of starring in a Star Trek
government training video. The Small Business/Self-Employed Division
had boldly gone where no IRS man had gone before — to a conference in
Anaheim, where they were put up in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms and
entertained by a man who was paid $27,500 to fly in and paint on stage a
portrait of Bono. Bono is the veteran Irish rocker knighted by the
Queen for his tireless campaign on behalf of debt forgiveness, which
doesn’t sound the IRS’s bag at all. But don’t worry, debt
forgiveness-wise Bono has Africa in mind, not New Jersey. And, as
Matthew Cowart tweeted me the other day, he did have a big hit with “I
Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which I believe is now the
official anthem of the IRS Cincinnati office.

It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart
of the matter: “With all due respect, this is not a training issue,” he
said. “This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt
all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it
strikes me — and maybe it’s just me — but it strikes me as a cultural,
systemic, character, moral issue.”

He’s right. If you don’t
instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at
public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual
isn’t going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is
corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it
can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the
revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS
official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood
that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When
Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS
told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on
thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very
enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the
tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they
should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far
more circumscribed powers.

Here’s another
congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator
Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on
members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage
over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:

“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

Senator
Kirk responded that “the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within
our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’”
For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I
think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.

Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn’t really
regard Fox News’s James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” but had to pretend
he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant.
So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when
he said he hadn’t lied to Congress because in fact he’d been lying when
he said he told the truth to the judge.

If you lie to one of
Holder’s minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the
slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the
attorney general’s. But the attorney general can apparently lie
willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress.

This, incidentally, is at the heart of the revelation (in a non-U.S.
newspaper, naturally) that hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone
records have been subpoenaed by the United States government. In 2011,
Eric Holder’s assistant attorney general Todd Hinen testified to the
House Judiciary Committee that “on average, we seek and obtain Section
215 orders less than 40 times per year.” Forty times per year doesn’t
sound very high, does it? What is that — the cell phones of a few
Massachusetts Chechens and some Yemeni pen-pals? No. The Verizon order
will eventually be included as just another individual Section 215
order, even though it covers over a hundred million Americans. Ongoing
universal monitoring of mass populations is being passed off to Congress
and the public as a few dozen narrowly targeted surveillance
operations. Mr. Hinen chose his words more carefully than his boss, but
both men are in the business of deceiving the citizenry, their elected
representatives, and maybe the judges, too.

Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state.
Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute
monarchy “clothed kings with a power almost without limits” in practice
“the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily
escaped his control.” What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if
administrative capability were to evolve to bring “the details of social
life and of individual existence” within the King’s oversight? Eric
Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. My comrade John Podhoretz,
doughty warrior of the New York Post, says relax, there’s
nothing to worry about. But how do I know he’s not just saying that
because Eric Holder’s monitoring his OnStar account and knows that when
he lost his car keys last Tuesday he was in the parking lot of Madam
Whiplash’s Bondage Dungeon?

When the state has the power to know
everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the
only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the
non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging. In August 2010,
President Obama began railing publicly against “groups with
harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity” (August 9th, a
speech in Texas) and “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names”
(August 21st, radio address). And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the
IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups
with harmless-sounding names, like “tea party,” “patriot,” and
“constitution.”

It may be that the strange synchronicity between
the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and
not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party
and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has
the capability to know everything except the difference between right
and wrong, it won’t end well.

I was chugging along buying Jack Dunphy’s
argument on the NSA business,'A
Small Price To Pay,' until I got to this bit:

There
are people living in the United States right now, many, many of them, who are
no less committed to jihad than the Tsarnaev brothers or Nidal Hassan.

Well,
how’d that happen? How did all these Tsarnaevs-in-waiting wind up living in the
United States? They were let in by the Government, and many of them were let in
in the years since 9/11, when we were supposedly on permanent “orange alert”.
The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs
the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons
would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration
system – by, say, according a graduate of a Yemeni madrassah a little more
scrutiny than a Slovene or Fijian. The President has unilaterally suspended the
immigration laws of the United States, and his Attorney-General prosecutes
those states such as Arizona who remain quaintly attached to them. The ID three
of the 9/11 hijackers acquired in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church,
Virginia and used to board the plane that day is part of a vast ongoing
subversion of American sovereignty with which many states and so-called
“sanctuary cities” actively collude.

As
for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his
business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on
what he’d like to do to infidels – and nobody said a word, lest they got tied
up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

Jack
will forgive me when I say this is less good cop/bad cop than no cop/bad cop.
Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness,
the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the
judgment calls that can no longer be made in public. That’s not an arrangement
that is likely to end well.

Yeppers!I’m supposed to be fine with letting the Federal government collect data
on me in the name of national security because it is racist, nativist, and
xenophobic to expect the government to uphold immigration laws, for example.No sale.